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Her Story, Give or Take a Few Lines

REFLECTION Joan Kron, an editor-at-large for Allure magazine, in her Upper East Side apartment.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

IN her modernist Upper East Side co-op, Joan Kron talks enthusiastically about new ideas she has for Allure magazine, where she is an editor-at-large covering her chosen subject, plastic surgery. She wants to turn a couple into documentaries, a storytelling technique she picked up after recently auditing a film class. After a recent knee surgery, she looks forward to regularly climbing back into her favorite pair of black kitten-heeled Jimmy Choo’s.

And then there are the preparations for her birthday; she’ll be 85 in January. “I am the oldest journalist alive,” Ms. Kron giggled as she hobbled slightly as she headed into her living room. “And I cover plastic surgery.”

Her upcoming birthday is purely another marker of time. She has outlived two husbands, a daughter and dozens of friends from the journalism and art worlds, including her friend Andy Warhol. Her mother subscribed to Allure until she died at 106.

“I never lie about my age. I tell everybody about my age because I don’t think women have enough role models,” Ms. Kron said as she leaned back into her living room couch. “Maybe, because I’m getting like these old ladies who just don’t care and tell the truth.”

It’s not just Ms. Kron’s age that makes her stand out along the supple-skinned halls of Condé Nast, where few reporters, editors or executives — except perhaps for 85-year-old Si Newhouse and the 92-year-old New Yorker contributor Roger Angell — appear to have passed the threshold of midlife. Ms. Kron has chronicled how the plastic surgery industry has grown up over the last two decades from a cottage industry to a $10 billion one last year. “The field has exploded,” said Linda Wells, Allure’s editor in chief. “It’s an area that both fascinates and confuses readers.”

In the last two decades, Ms. Kron, a former reporter for New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has written frank investigative stories about the latest research on breast regeneration following mastectomies, the benefits, costs and hazards of liposuction and abdominoplasty and the risks of butt lifts (they’re painful and can shift or sag). She can often describe in stomach-churning detail the painful risks these surgeries carry, like the burns and nerve injuries that come with liposuction or the scarring that follow abdominoplasties.

Photo

Joan Kron, center, with Dr. Fredric Brandt, left, and Linda Wells at Allure magazine’s Best of Beauty Awards this year.

While television programs and the print media may mock the celebrities who have had too much work done or the dangers of disreputable doctors, Ms. Kron knows plenty of women who still want it. She cites in her book how even Queen Elizabeth I banned looking glasses in her court so visitors could not clearly see the signs of aging.

There is something dark about the articles she has written. Doctors are murdered by patients addicted to plastic surgery. Actors stick to a strict schedule of treatments during Oscar season and friends steadily die on operating tables.

Her sources have not been kind to her for her coverage. In 1993, Ms. Kron said she was locked in a room by officers of a society who did not want her to write about the argument on fat removal that Dr. Steven M. Hoefflin and Dr. Wallace A. Goodstein, both plastic surgeons, had at a conference. She survived a two-year legal battle after writing about Dr. Wesley Harline, a general surgeonin Utah with an expertise in cosmetic surgery known for his breast implants, who greeted Ms. Kron splattered in blood and let her tour facilities where recuperating patients had to share beds.

But plastic surgeons and dermatologists seem to have developed a grudging fondness for Ms. Kron. “She’s met with a little bit of awe, a little bit of fear and a whole lot of love,” said Adeena Babbitt, public relations director for the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, who has known Ms. Kron on stories for the last decade. “She tries to make a point of respecting that the doctors are doctors. They went to school for this. They don’t think it is a joke.”

The catalog of procedures Ms. Kron personally had done includes three face lifts (she chronicled the first two surgeries in her book “Lift: Wanting, Fearing and Having a Face-Lift”) as well as Botox, Reloxin, Restylane and Juvéderm treatments. She paid for all the procedures and said that she does not accept free trial treatments of devices. If she thinks that a surgeon or dermatologist discounted a procedure for her, she sends expensive ties and once even custom-made alligator boots. Sometimes she uses her pacemaker as a polite excuse.

“I never want to be seen as an advocate for or against it,” said Ms. Kron, though she added she doesn’t think women should keep wrinkles because they earned them. “That is totally ridiculous.”

Her knowledge of plastic surgery has made her an increasingly coveted source to the wrinkling readership of Allure. The median age of its readers rose to 34, from 27.9, over the last decade. While the magazine’s circulation has grown steadily to 1.1 million in recent years, its newsstand sales, like many magazines, have shrunk in half over the last five years, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, but the magazine’s advertising pages grew by 25 percent in the past year while most magazines were struggling, according to data tracked by the Publisher’s Information Bureau.

Plastic surgery reporter is a third act of sorts for Ms. Kron. Her first life began when the Yale graduate who studied costume design left New York City in 1950 to marry a Philadelphia surgeon named Sam Kron. Her parents introduced her to Dr. Kron while at the Grossinger’s Catskill Resort to help forget about Jerry Marder, her high school sweetheart from the Fieldston School. Ms. Kron settled into their Philadelphia town house, raised their son and daughter, ran her husband’s surgical practice and worked in design. But Ms. Kron and her friends describe an aching dissatisfaction.

“We married fairly young and we had children and we were saddled with a lot of responsibility,” said Judy Lieb, a friend of Ms. Kron’s who worked with her on the Philadelphia Arts Council.

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The Arts Council led to Ms. Kron’s first rebirth. As chairwoman of the council from the fall of 1966 to the spring of 1967, she dreamed up arts events to bring to Philadelphia. She also became a fan of Mr. Warhol even though her friend Audrey Sabol, a fellow committee member, called him “a flash in the pan.” During her time as chairwoman, Ms. Kron organized a series of events including the exhibit called the Museum of Merchandise, which Mr. Warhol designed a perfume called You’re In (Ms. Kron still giggles when she says to say the perfume’s title fast) and presented it in a Coke bottle. There also was the two-day event where the Velvet Underground performed at the Y.W.H.A. Auditorium and Mr. Warhol presented his films. The music upset some committee members so much that they called for Ms. Kron’s impeachment.

Her home became a salon of sorts for artists, architects and some actors and musicians. Her son Daniel Kron, who then was 11, recalls the Velvet Underground having a sleepover in their living room. He and his sister Leslie tried to figure out the gender of Moe Tucker, the band’s drummer. He remembers Mr. Warhol asking him about what he thought he should put on a poster he was designing for a Lincoln Center event and telling Mr. Warhol how much he liked the previous poster designed by another family friend, Roy Lichtenstein. And Mr. Kron still recalls how his father could not believe Ms. Kron would spend $100 on a Claes Oldenburg watercolor of a sandwich. (She recently lent it to the Whitney.)

But that life for Ms. Kron came to an end in 1968. That year, Ms. Kron, her son and daughter followed her husband to what is now Sri Lanka to help him do medical work. Her daughter, who was 16, picked up a deadly infection while scrubbing walls in a leper colony and died within four days. (Mr. Warhol gave her a perfume bottle from the Museum of Merchandise as a gift as an expression of sympathy.) Shortly afterward, Ms. Kron moved back to New York City and reunited with Mr. Marder, her high school sweetheart, who was a senior account executive at Grey Advertising and who eventually would become executive vice president Daniel Kron said even though he was 13 when his sister died, he considers it a dividing point.

Video

Joan Kron and Plastic Surgery Journalism

Joan Kron, an editor at Allure magazine, discusses how she got into plastic surgery journalism.

By Fritzie Andrade, Krishnan Vasudevan and Deborah Acosta on Publish Date December 27, 2012.
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Watch in Times Video »

“It was a very sad chapter in my mother’s life,” Mr. Kron said, “But typical of my mother, she turned my sister’s death into a new beginning for her.” He added, “She’s always inventing something out of nothing.”

Living in New York with a suddenly larger family — she has three stepchildren — she worked as a journalist writing about design and death including grief therapy, the hospice movement, suicide and identifying military remains. By the early 1990s, she shifted to beauty. When she heard that Ms. Wells, the Allure editor, had assigned a younger reporter to cover a story about face lifts, Ms. Kron stressed that she felt she was better qualified for such an assignment. She started visiting celebrity plastic surgeons her friends referred her to and chronicled her experience for the magazine and ultimately for a book.

Plastic surgeons and dermatologists seem grateful to have her attending their meetings and reading their studies. Dr. Michael McGuire, a plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, Calif., and a past president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said that plastic surgery has struggled to attract credible journalists to cover it.

“She has brought a perspective to plastic surgery when there is a lot of sensationalism,” Dr. McGuire said. “They’re always trying to dig up the dirt that somehow we are trying to do plastic surgery on unsuspecting teens.”

Ms. Kron has plenty of theories on how best to stay young beyond surgery. She limits time with friends who are the same age “because they talk about ailments.” She didn’t let her age ever keep her from missing a deadline. Ms. Kron also doesn’t seem to ever stifle emotions. She is a liberal giggler when she talks about her reporting and generous weeper when she describes her daughter’s death. She also has reached a point where she believes she no longer needs plastic surgery.

“I’ve heard of women having their noses done at 90,” Ms. Kron said. “One doctor once told me a woman said she didn’t want to die with that nose.” She added, “I’m not really interested in having more.”

Ms. Kron realizes she has plenty of living ahead. When her mother reached 103 and moved into a nursing home, she experienced a reinvention that carried its own joys and complications.

“The minute she got there, some guy who couldn’t even remember his own name proposed to her,” Ms. Kron said. “One day she said, ‘Don’t let me marry him.’ I said, ‘Mom, I won’t let you get married. Don’t worry.’ ”

Correction: January 3, 2013

A picture caption last Thursday with an article about Joan Kron, an editor at large for Allure magazine, where she covers plastic surgery, misspelled the given name of a dermatologist who was shown with Ms. Kron and Linda Wells, Allure’s editor in chief, at the magazine’s Best of Beauty Awards last year. He is Dr. Fredric Brandt, not Fredrick.

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2012, on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Her Story, Give or Take a Few Lines. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe